


5635

by nateyface



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Gen, Haunted Phone AU, Haunting, in which Joel is a phone, shippy if you squint and tilt your head
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-27 14:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1714091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nateyface/pseuds/nateyface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You get what you pay for, or so the saying goes, so when Matt's free phone from a friend of a friend of Geoff's starts conjuring text messages from no number at all, there isn't a whole lot he can do but hope this 'Joel' slips up and ends the pointless prank.</p>
            </blockquote>





	5635

**Author's Note:**

> Fic requested by [asinwolves](http://asinwolves.tumblr.com). Based on my 3-sentence fics for "mattjoel, something is haunted" prompt, [here](http://ryanslostfootage.tumblr.com/post/86986521537/mattjoel-something-is-haunted-au-d) and [here](http://ryanslostfootage.tumblr.com/post/86988705877/oh-no-you-dont-mattjoel-that-haunted-phone-au).

_“Ii n1 t333?”_

Matt stares down at his phone with a frown. The number doesn’t display, a phenomenon he’s never seen before, but he doesn’t have time to think about it with the way Burnie stares at him expectantly.

“Something you’d like to share with the class?” Next to him, Gus snickers and folds a sheet of paper. “Matt, if it’s important, you can go. Otherwise – Gus I swear to God, if you flick that football at me…” Burnie reaches across the broad meeting table to scuffle with Gus.

“No, nothing important.” Matt doesn’t bother to raise his voice enough to be heard over the pair. He slides his phone back into his pocket and makes a mental note to ask Geoff later where exactly he got this phone. For right now, Geoff is lazily forming his hands into a goalpost for Gus’s paper football, and Burnie tries to get the meeting back on track before they all head back to their desks and get to work.

It’s dark out by the time Matt gets up from his desk and stretches, thoroughly sick of staring at screens and setting up shots. He checks his phone for the time and a few texts from coworkers, scrolling past the bizarre numberless text again. Maybe someone’s checking if the number is active? Though using an incoherent keysmash for that seems stupid. He sighs through his nose and steps outside just in time to see Geoff pulling his coat on to leave.

“Geoff. Hey, about this phone…” Immediately, the man groans and crosses his arms.

“Look, it wasn’t my phone, so if there’s problems with it – I dunno, you get what you pay for, I guess,” Geoff protests wearily. Matt waves it off and makes a noise of disagreement.

“No, it’s fine, great for a free phone,” he says quickly. “Just, who exactly used to own this thing? I got a weird message today, and the number won’t display.” He pulls the offending phone out of his pocket and pulls up the message, showing it to Geoff.

“Huh. That’s weird as dicks.” He squints and rubs his mustache thoughtfully, taking the phone from Matt to fuss with it. “I dunno, dude. Maybe Gus would know.”

“He already went home,” Matt says uselessly. He shoves the phone away and shrugs. “Thanks anyway. It works fine otherwise.” They say goodnight and part ways, and Matt doesn’t think much about it for the rest of the evening.

It’s another couple of days before anything new comes up with his phone. He’s taking a break from the recording booth when it buzzes in his pocket, and when he sees the empty space where a phone number should be, he feels more than a little creeped out.

_“is anyone there?”_

Matt decides he may as well answer at this point. Maybe he’s right and it is someone checking if the number’s active, or it could be someone with an extremely private number trying to contact the old owner. He types a quick ‘who is this?’ in reply and goes back into the booth, leaving the phone on the table outside.

The messages are long forgotten when he picks the phone back up again and sees the blinking green indicator. With a flick of his thumb, the screen comes to life and displays one new message.

“ _My name was Joel._ ”

Matt sits down in a stiff folding chair nearby. The past tense makes him nervous, and he’s almost completely sure this has to be a prank with the way it’s written. He cautiously writes ‘was?’ back to the numberless conversation and stares intently, waiting for an answer.

“ _It’s a long story._ ”

The letters appear in the text box first, as though typed by his own thumbs, before the message blinks away. A second later, the phone buzzes to alert the delivery – received, not sent.

He leaves the phone in the office that night.

When he heads into work the next morning, five minutes late but bearing a tray of coffees as penance, Burnie immediately hands him the phone.

“You forgot this, man. It was buzzing like crazy – if it’s anything important, let me know. I can handle some of your workload.” Burnie pats Matt on the shoulder.

“You mean you’ll make Gus do it, right?” Matt shakes his head and smiles. “Nah, I’m sure it’s nothing. This phone’s been acting weird lately anyway.” He shrugs.

“Really? Have you talked to Geoff about it?” Burnie leads Matt toward the break room while they talk, starting up a pot of coffee.

“A little,” Matt answers, and he’s about to elaborate when he wakes up the phone and sees his notifications. Six new messages, all from no one – or supposedly from ‘Joel’. He frowns and scrolls through them, not reading much, just skimming by words like ‘accident’ and ‘exorcism’. With a heavy sigh, he pockets the phone, deciding he has no idea what to say to the prankster and he has work to do anyway.

Over the next few days, Matt sends the occasional ‘okay’ or ‘huh, weird’ back to Joel, hoping that if he goes with it for long enough, the messages might let something slip revealing the prank for what it is. He’s eliminated Burnie and Gus as culprits; neither of them ever have a phone out or anything when he’s interacting with Joel. Geoff doesn’t seem smart enough to pull off something like this, so Matt starts to wonder if it’s a former owner of the phone, or a ‘friend’ of someone who used to have the number.

The weird factor increases when Matt puts his phone in airplane mode for a while to focus on work, and Joel’s messages still get through. He has Gus and Burnie both try texting him as well, and both of them report failures – so why can Joel still reach him with the signal off? Maybe – he isn’t sure of anything – but maybe Joel is telling the truth. There could be some kernel of veracity in his bizarre story.

 _“So you’re a spirit haunting a phone?”_ Matt texts one evening, on the couch with a beer and some B-movie on cable. There doesn’t seem to be a time when Joel sleeps or is otherwise busy, so he figures the late hour won’t bother him, and sure enough a message pings into his inbox in moments.

“ _that’s what I’ve been telling you, dude, you are the worst listener,_ ” Joel replies, and Matt chuckles. He scrolls back through their conversation, taking the story a little more seriously this time.

Joel died in an accident – what sort, he doesn’t specify – and haunted his old home for some time; after a while, the new residents called in help in the form of a ‘traveling priest’. From what Joel could tell, the priest conned the family and had no idea what he was doing. One sloppily-researched fake exorcism later, and he unbound Joel from the house, trapping him instead in the phone he was using to peek at Google through the proceedings. The residents and the con all assumed it went great, considering there were no more rattles and bumps in the night, and Joel stopped being able to write ‘Invest In Gold’ on the family whiteboard.

Matt stops for a moment and quirks an eyebrow.

_“Invest in gold, huh?”_

Joel’s answer rings in quickly. “ _Yes. Buy lots. Need stock tips?”_

Stock tips from a ghost. Matt chuckles and shakes his head as he types a quick ‘no thx’ and sips his beer. He scrolls back up to find out the rest, hoping for some idea of how the phone got from the priest’s hands to his, but Joel’s messages explained that since being stuck no one had bothered answering him. The camera never faced anywhere helpful, especially – mostly pockets or tabletops. Matt quickly texts Geoff asking _again_ where his friend of a friend obtained the phone, but at this hour he’s likely passed out or drunk.

An idle thought floats by as he flicks through messages, and he returns to the conversation with Joel.

_“Do you have ghost friends or anything?”_

The pause between his message and the answer is much longer than normal. He takes another swig of beer.

 _“No. :(“_ arrives at last, and an unexpected weight fills Matt’s chest. It must absolutely suck, stuck in some stranger’s shitty phone with only one asshole to talk to – one who didn’t even take him seriously until now. He sighs through his nose.

“ _We could be friends._ ” The message is typed and sent before he can really process it. It’s a weird thing to say, and he quickly backpedals. “ _If you want, I mean, I don’t wanna force you into anything._ ”

Joel’s answer makes him a lot happier than he expects, and he tries to excuse it as the beer’s fault, even as he reads and rereads the text.

“ _:) that would be awesome, dude._ ”

Matt’s alarm goes off, telling him to start getting ready for work, and he abruptly realizes he and Joel texted the night away like teenage girls. He only emptied two beers before switching to coffee – not that the change helps the massive headache he’s nursing. With a splash of water to his face and a couple of aspirin, he gets geared up to face the day ahead despite no sleep.

Joel texts him an encouraging handful of smileys and promises to try not to be distracting for a while. Matt manages to make it all the way to lunch without falling asleep at his desk, and as he pulls out his phone to talk to Joel again, he can’t help but laugh at what he finds when the screen wakes.

“Yeah, dude? You cruising the Dow Jones website while I’m working?” he says aloud, as if Joel can hear him. He closes the browser and texts a similar thought to Joel as he gets up and heads to the break room.

“ _You were working, I was bored…_ ” Matt chuckles at the message, and another one pings in. “ _You know I’m here now, anyway._ ” It does relieve Matt somewhat that Joel can at least fuss with other parts of his phone, and isn’t just trapped in text messages forever.

 _“Still think I should buy gold?”_ he teases.

“ _I will always think that, dude._ ”

After work, Matt checks in again and the screen is mid-scroll through stock quotes on the NASDAQ website. It freezes for a moment as he looks at it, like a raccoon caught mid-theft, then carries on as if he isn’t watching. He pockets it rather than tease Joel about it now, and misses a goodbye wave from Geoff as he leaves.

The next few days, Matt continues to ignore his coworkers, instead texting Joel on his breaks and telling him about what they do. It’s been a while since he’s gotten to explain his job at Rooster Teeth to a new friend, and Joel seems genuinely interested – he’s not that old a ghost, and says he owned an Xbox when he was alive, so he understands. They veer off topic to _Fable_ and a few other titles on the system during one lunch hour, and Matt ends up shouting to his phone when they get in an argument.

“Uh, long-distance friend,” he explains to Burnie halfheartedly later. “Sorry. Won’t happen again.”

Things even out at the office as he and Joel get their schedules better aligned. Matt buys a handful of games so Joel has something else to do, and Joel reminds Matt when he should be getting to bed, even if Matt occasionally doesn’t listen. They still don’t run out of things to talk about, and he starts telling the other guys about funny shit Joel says. It’s pretty smooth sailing, even when Joel downloads Grindr on the phone as a joke.

“ _HOPE YOU DON’T MIND,_ ” reads Joel’s text that morning, and Matt nearly snorts coffee out his nose.

 _“Nah I was gonna download it anyway ;)”_ he snaps back, and the phone goes quiet for a while. Joel eventually just texts back a wink, and Matt isn’t entirely sure what to do with that, but glosses over it.

Another time, he returns to the phone at his lunch hour to find a string of profanity-laden texts, especially ones that just say “ _motherFUCKER_ ,” and as he watches the screen he discovers the source of Joel’s frustration.

 _“Super Hexagon, huh?”_ Matt chuckles. “ _Let me show you how it’s done._ ”

Half an hour later, he’s still cursing wildly at the phone and he would have thrown the damn thing if not for poor Joel stuck inside. He’s still tempted, especially when Joel just texts him “ _HA HA_ ” for his trouble.

It’s been weeks – months, maybe – with their comfortable dynamics, and Matt is sitting on the couch with a beer and the phone, not bothering with a movie. Something occurs to him, something that makes him feel like a complete idiot, and he interrupts Joel’s Sudoku to send him a message.

_“joel do you think you could call me?”_

There’s a minute of nothing, then he sees Joel typing.

“ _Maybe. It’d be nice to hear a voice after so long._ ” That’s what Matt thought, and he adjusts his position on the couch to one of concentration.

“ _Try._ ”

He sets the phone on the coffee table, staring at it intently. The seconds tick by in slow, agonizing drips of time, and he wonders how long it should take a ghost to figure out how this works. Joel seems to have mastered texting with no trouble.

Lost in thought, he jumps as the phone actually rings. There’s no information for the caller – not even the ‘unknown number’ notification. It’s a blank screen and the place he swipes to answer.

“Joel?”

“Matt!”

**Author's Note:**

> You can always find me at my personal blog, thatisntscience, or my AH blog, [ryanslostfootage](http://ryanslostfootage.tumblr.com).


End file.
